technically snuggling

Technique is unavoidable - whether you are learning to build a house, cook a soup, make a dance piece - it's no good running from technique - cultivation of the thing you are doing, enhancing of, making more or less of - distilling or spicing or weaving or melting or tearing or sewing or combining (in the "domestic arts," that's where the real names for actions are kept). But how we regard technique is the key: in terms of emphasis, keep it firmly shoved to the side. It is not "it." Technique houses it - but "it" is intent, purpose, heart, the transformer and transformation and the transformed thing, all together - the subject and the verb and the object. Technique is how I lay my sentence out.

Now, reverse everything I've just said and it's just as true.

As the first leaves fall - one at a time, lazily - I'm working on my snuggle technique.